by piker
Wait. I'm back on rinktums. Please we gotta know the origin.
Railroad Forums
Moderator: MEC407
BigLou80 wrote:...That being said 10' of fill is about the best case scenario ( as simple as bridge construction gets) for installing a road over pass assuming the town will allow the road to be closed for a few weeks.Building a bridge 10' up isn't really going to solve the problem. A GP40 is 14-15 feet tall. The road is going to require major work one way or another. It might almost be easier to lower the road, from personal experience, going up is harder than down when dealing with dirt.
KSmitty wrote:I am aware that 10' wont cut it. I was trying to say that fill is easy to dig in, be it for removal or foundations. More fill can easily be trucked in to raise the road another 5 feet. Either way its not a terribly complex or expensive fix compared to many others.BigLou80 wrote:...That being said 10' of fill is about the best case scenario ( as simple as bridge construction gets) for installing a road over pass assuming the town will allow the road to be closed for a few weeks.Building a bridge 10' up isn't really going to solve the problem. A GP40 is 14-15 feet tall. The road is going to require major work one way or another. It might almost be easier to lower the road, from personal experience, going up is harder than down when dealing with dirt.
and Rinktums-http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Rinktum-
"An extra special solution or invention for a mechanical design situation."
RenegadeMonster wrote:Thanks for the info.Decent/reliable odds:
Are there any other branch/lines that Pan Am have reactivated or any that could potentially be reactivated in the next 10 years or so?
F-line to Dudley via Park wrote:This could be very possible in the future. The Back Road will remain as a through route for freight until both the Jay and Rumford mills shutter operations. No indication the owners of those two mills are looking to close those mills today. Just can't see Pan Am or anyone else running a new branch line from Royal Jct. to Rumford for a few mills and the SLR interchange while all of the rest of the freight is on the Lower Road. However, once that happens, there will not be any reason to remain on the Back Road east of Danville if the Lower Road to Augusta is rebuilt by NNEPRA. The Waterville to Augusta segment has 115lb rail that could be rebuilt with new ties, ballasted and surfaced to bring to 25MPH. Surprising that NNEPRA has not brought the Downeaster to August yet as that is where all of the funding for the Downeaster service comes from. The section of the Back Road from Danville to Royal Jct. could become an extended main line for the SLR provided they get direct access to Portland and can capture some of the Canadian bound freight from there. Their old line to Deering is not as well positioned geographically as the MEC is.
Conditionally realistic if stars align, but unlikely real-world odds:
-- Lower Road, Brunswick-Augusta (MEDOT-owned). PAR retains right-of-first-refusual ability to take back the trackage rights at any time. Some scenarios could force it back into play, such as future Downeaster extensions to Augusta rationalizing/pooling costs by switching the Waterville mainline from the Back Road to the Lower Road to max out cost amortizations. A combo of NNEPRA needing freight revenue to underwrite its extension costs and a new company owner needing to rationalize D1 operating costs could easily result in a decision to bootstrap the freights on new Class 4 / signalized / 286K weight / double-stack cleared track Brunswick-Augusta with a reciprocal company investment to rehab the Augusta IT to Class 2 + 286K + DS mainline status. Any such scenario would have a trade-in of ASAP abandonment of the Lower Road from Leeds Jct. to Waterville and stripping of all usable re-lay hardware to plug state-of-repair elsewhere on the system, but this may be the public-private price for keeping D1 viable if new ownership puts the screws to the state to help them rationalize further investment in Northern Maine
F-line to Dudley via Park wrote: -- Mountain Div., St. Johnsbury-Gilman (PAR-owned). Only exists on the company ledger as legacy paper cruft from Twin State/Lamoille Valley's convoluted trackage rights agreement there. Twin State's rights expire 12/31/2018 if the estate of LV's deceased owner does not step forward and explicitly claim their 10-year extension option to 2028. PAR would've sold this track to VTrans years ago were it not for a fight LV waged claiming they had rights to sell all the rail hardware for scrap. If LV passes quietly into the night next Xmas then this gets scraped promptly off the books in a sale to the state. Mellon does not want any shennanigans up here causing headaches when he puts the company up for sale.Amazing the entire line still has rail on it to include the Vermont segment and segment between Westbrook and North Conway. Why the State of Maine put welded rail on the portion of the line that Guilford removed some years ago is baffling when that welded rail should have been installed on the Lower Road for the Downeaster.